Software Development, Technology and Innovation

Daily Archives: December 19, 2004

Nicola and I decided now was the right time to get a pet. Nic is fond of cats and if you can get them young enough they can be trained to be good with kids. Anyway, on Friday Nic called me while my students were having a break and told me that he had a new addition to the household.

This is fergus exploring the house. He is on top of the box that we cut a hole in so that he could go inside and escape from the marauding toddlers that both infest and visit our house.

Of course, a big part of having a pet is to teach your kids to love animals and be gentle. Bella is pretty good, although she does squeel when excited which would be enough to scare anyone. When she isn’t squeeling, she and Fergus seem to get along fine.

You can only sleep with the humans for so long before you have to take a real nap. Here is Fergus in his box with his various blankets and toys. Bella donated her teddy bear to her younger sibling.

Last week I posted up some thoughts on IIS 7.0. The “big thought” was that application developers should be able to drag a component into their applications and automagically be able to host IIS in-process to provide management interfaces for head-less systems without the deployment headaches associated with IIS (which might get better with IIS 7.0 anyway).

Well, within a few hours Christian Weyercommented that I should just leverage the HttpListener class in Whidbey for this purpose. That was a great idea and I decided to tackle it this afternoon, although hooking HttpListener into the ASP.NET hosting infrastructure was too much like hard work for a lazy Sunday afternoon so I went hunting for the updated Cassini implementation that the ASP.NET team used in Whidbey to support web-development.

The result is this VERY CRUDE proof of concept which contains a component that you can drag onto a design surface – set a few properties and then call Start(). It just uses the Server class out of the WebDev.WebHost.dll file that ships with Whidbey (so its definately not production strength stuff – do not deploy).

So – for the ASP.NET and IIS team members out there listening, this is the kind of hosting support I am talking about – drag and drop. IIS shouldn’t need to be installed on the machine to support it either. In addition to that – the component should have events which can be hooked to enable the host application to interact with the requests and provide contextual information (especially useful for management tools).